Abu Hammam al-Shami

Abu Hammam al-Shami (died 5 March 2015) was a senior commander of the Al-Nusra Front, the offshoot of al-Qaeda in Syria.

Biography
In the late 1990s, Abu Hammam al-Shami traveled to Afghanistan, where he was trained in a camp run by veteran Syrian jihadi strategist Abu Musab al-Suri. He then trained in al-Qaeda camps, where he met one of the 9/11 hijackers and personally swore allegiance to Osama Bin Laden. By 2001, he started to recruit fellow Syrians in training camps in Afghanistan and became the leader of the Syrian contingent of al-Qaeda. After the fall of the Taliban that year, he fled to Iraq with senior Egyptian operative Saif al-Adel, and he conducted training with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during the Iraq War. In 2005, at the request of al-Qaeda's leadership, he briefly returned to Afghanistan. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman tasked him with leading al-Qaeda efforts in Syria, and he was arrested en route in Lebanon. Detained for five years, he found his way to Syria and joined the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's offshoot in Syria. During the Syrian Civil War, he served as an al-Qaeda commander. He appeared in a March 2014 video where he declared that his negotiations to make peace with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) failed, leading to war between the two organizations.

On 5 March 2015, the Syrian Arab Republic launched two airstrikes against militants in Salqin and Hobait, both near the Idlib Province city of Saraqeb. The areas were gathering points for the al-Nusra Front, and as many as 13 senior al-Nusra commanders, including Abu Hammam al-Shami, were killed in the airstrikes. Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani was initially speculated to have been injured, but it was later confirmed that he was alive.